Here's The Huge Difference In Success An App Sees When Facebook Gets Behind It

Facebook launched two interesting apps recently, and promoted
them both very differently, giving us a perfect test case of how
powerful Facebook can be if it chooses to really push an app.
Those two apps are Messenger and Paper.

As most Facebook users know, Messenger is the company's
standalone messaging app. It's a competitor to WhatsApp, Kik,
Line, and all those other messaging apps. In the last few months,
the company has split off Facebook's regular messaging and chat
functions into Messenger, and
Facebook users on mobile phones have been heavily pushed into
downloading and using Messenger to chat with their Facebook
friends. Soon, the mobile push to Messenger will become all but
forced, and messages will be stripped out of Facebook's mobile
app completely.

Facebook's push in favor of Messenger has had a predictable
effect on its fortunes. This data comes from App Annie. It shows
Messenger's download rank history in the Apple App Store in the
U.S. — a market large enough to function as a rough proxy for
everyone else.

Messenger rank download history:

App
Annie

You can see that when Facebook pushes Messenger, it stays near
the top of the App Store. It's close to the No. 1 messaging app
all the time (yellow line) and in the Top 20 of all app types
(blue line).

But Facebook treated Paper very differently. Paper is a
Flipboard-type experience that runs a lot of news alongside your
Facebook account. It's beautiful to use (I use it all the time).
But, just like Messenger, it doesn't really do anything that
competing apps aren't already doing.

Facebook hasn't pushed Paper on its users in any way. It released
the app, and left it to its fate.

Paper rank download history:

App Annie

Note the scale: Paper is currently the 107th most downloaded
social network app (red line), and around the 1,500th most
popular app of any kind (blue line). It's nowhere, in other
words.

Our "control" case — and I use that term lightly — is an app that
was neither promoted nor ignored by Facebook: WhatsApp, which
Facebook acquired earlier this year. For most of its history it
has lived and died on its own merits. But note that its fate is
rather more variable than either of its cousins.

WhatsApp rank download history:

App
Annie

WhatsApp does well, but it can never be sure how well it will do.
It hovers erratically between being the 60th most popular app and
the 20th (blue line). Even though it's one of the biggest social
network apps (yellow line) it often falls out of the Top 5 or 10
most popular apps.

Why is this interesting? Because
Facebook is putting a big push behind apps, and encouraging
developers to use Facebook as both a development and a marketing
platform. Appmakers will have to pay for ads to get promoted on
Facebook, of course. But the Messenger and Paper experiences look
like they represent the extreme bookends of the Facebook app
promotion experience.